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3D Printing

So I’m back at school again, so I returned to where I left of with the dog. The chassis has been sitting around in CAD form for a while, two days ago I printed this thing. It’s my first time using one of the commercial 3D printers. It’s the same 3D printer I keep seeing at universities, of the Dimension brand, that prints extruded plastic with a weaker support material.

For a job the size of the quadruped, the print time was 44 hours. The chassis had to be put on its side and diagonal across the printing bed to even fit.

When it was done printing after 44 hours, it was a piece of plastic encased in a support material block. For the fancy Objet printer in the other lab, the support material seems like a powdery material you have to pressure wash off. This material you had to peel off with your fingernails and some metal picks resembling dentist’s picks.

And after some frustration and an hour or so of picking away, it looks like this:

The little gaps will need some creative sanding, and I’ll have to re-bore the holes. Otherwise, I’m getting closer to mounting the motors, legs, and valves. The next step is to 3D print the precision valve parts with the UV resin Objet printer.

The x-axis is slipping in the reverse direction. Forward is fine, maybe a little oil will fix it. Y and Z axes work just fine, but the motor doesn’t like low speeds with the motor controlling program I wrote. I’ll have to change some of the pulse timing for smoother operation. I found out the set screws don’t really work with threaded rod, so I’ll have to make some solid shaft adapters. The control will come soon! It seems easier to write a G-Code parser for the Arduino right now and just have the printer blindly print files, but a nice interface like on Replicatorg might be nicer. I might just end up doing both, since writing it myself will ultimately be more customizable than modifying the source code. It’ll be important once I start using some funky tools.

3D Printing has risen to an undeniable level of popularity in the last years. From something that was hardly known to be possible to the public, 3D printing has made it to public access. Projects like the RepRap and the Makerbot have gained some momentum. My own project team, Fab@Home has done its part to contribute to this community.

So here’s where I enter. My main interest with 3D printing technology was to apply it to bioengineering. Take some cells from various tissues you want to reproduce, and culture them in a bio reactor. When the cells are sufficient in quantity, load them up in some form of semisolid gel and extrude them with extreme accuracy. Under the right biotic culturing conditions, and with the right blueprints and precision, you can reproduce tissues. Combine those tissues, and voila! ORGANS.

But it doesn’t just stop there. Of course you can satisfy the organ donor waiting list and help hundreds of thousands of people live normal lives again. But there is more. Say you have vestigial features you have in an organ that you could be better off without. Why not harvest some cells and rebuild a new, better organ to accomplish what you need more efficiently? With organs made with your own cells, there would be no chance of rejection. Organ printing can do things impossible to achieve with regular evolution.

There’s more. My brother suggested this one to me. In agriculture, highly developed breeds of corn are developed through genetic modification. Each corn plant must be propagated by hand by trained technicians. But with 3D bioprinting, there is so much more you can do. Engineer a convenient capsule to house the plant and artificially create your own seed packets for an otherwise fragile sterile plant! Print these out in mass quantities to grow crops that are otherwise unreasonable to use. Of course it’s a stretch in development, but I’m sure engineers will not fail to impress with their innovations.

Now imagine layering cells from different organisms together so closely that they develop in unison and equal to one another. Imagine a chimeral tree that produced different fruits at different times throughout the year, or an animal that contained the genetic material of different species that were otherwise incompatible. Imagine silicon printed with living cells. Transistors and neurons printed together to form viable human/machine neural networks! You can tell I’m excited about the possibilities with this technology.

So here’s my first 3D printer:

Only the chassis is shown + motors. If may not be the most efficient mechanically, but I’m proud to say that this printer was entirely of my design. Only if you count the current extrusion tool too, which I modified and developed as my assignment on the Fab@Home team. The whole thing is made of acrylic, which I got cut since I don’t own a laser cutter (though it would be nice considering the reasonable cost of these lasers).

Here are some of my CAD drawings in designing this thing. On and off, acquiring the parts (it’s surprising how difficult it is to find accurate 3/8″ aluminum rods) and designing the printer took part of my fall semester. I didn’t have time to get the acrylic and assemble the whole thing until winter break when I got home.

With the stepper motors and the 1/4″-20 standard (not the expensive Acme stuff) threaded rod, the setup can theoretically reach tens of microns of resolution with microstepping. However, due to the inaccuracy of my extruder, that resolution probably won’t make much of a difference. The extruder I have is a syringe with a plunger that is driven by a drive screw that is driven by a continuous rotation servo motor.

Comically, the syringe tubes were taken from the sharps disposal section of my lab (it probably wasn’t that wise of an idea). Good thing the lab wasn’t dealing with anything medical. I will have to replace them with sterile tubes once I begin wet testing, since contamination is a huge issue.

I’m using EasyStepperDrivers from Sparkfun to drive the stepper motors in this project. Coupled to an Arduino coupled to ReplicatorG (for now until i develop my own), I’ll have to make a custom .xml file for the servo extrusion configuration.

The next challenge for this project is to get viable structures to print. It’s a difficult problem right now for bioprinting, as finding a 3D blueprint of an organ or biological structure requires identifying hundreds of different materials. My two material setup probably won’t be able to accomplish that, so for now I’m stuck printing with two materials.

I’m ordering sodium alginate + calcium chloride to experiment with. When mixed, the calcium causes the alginate to form closer bonds and become more solid-like. With some living cells in between, I can hopefully build up some reasonably sized structures. I intended to use the cells from a rosebush on my lawn, but my winter break is proving to be too short for me to culture the cells now. Added with an internship at an electrical/civil firm I’m working for right now, it’ll have to wait till the semester. I hope I have time.

I was debating between two styles of approaching bioprinting. Some scholars researching bioprinting use inkjet technology to deposit bio-ink laden with living cells to deposit many small layers of living cells to build up tissues. Since the volume of the drop of liquid ejected from an ink-jet is reasonably close to the volume of a cell, the inkjet can reliably deposit cells to their target. However, inkjets use bubbles generated by heat from a resistor or by mechanical shock to create such precise droplets of ink. Therefore, cell survivability is an issue. The other approach is to bundle many cells into workable unit voxels. The larger units could be placed accurately while maintaining cell survival. I’ve decided to make both systems.

Coming up next semester, (if I can get access to a biolab) actual printed cells! And a belt drive inkjet system.

So I went to the Maker Faire with my project team to show off our latest Fab@Home work. Though I have followed the progression of the MAKE culture for some time, I never really participated in any of their events. I always wanted to visit a Maker Faire to participate in the combat robotics events, but never had the chance.

3D printers everywhere. The RepRap and the MakerBot really have progressed in popularity since their beginnings a few years back. I was impressed by the sheer number of emerging competitive systems that are constantly adding to the amateur 3D printer culture.

Our project boasts the ability to be more than a 3D printer. We have milling, hot foam cutting, both cold and hot extrusion, and 2D scanning on our bot. Hopefully, by developing our Fab@Home as a platform for tools rather than specializing on 3D printing, our product will appeal as the superior maker’s tool.

I’ve personally been working on displacement tools (squeezing stuff out of syringes), milling, and ice printing. For the ice table, I basically freeze water on a plate cooled with liquid nitrogen and build up structures. The appeal of ice is its low cost to create molds/temporary models.

The Maker culture is pretty charming (see the singing seafood art car or the flame-breathing dragon). To me, it seems like a more conservative, technical version of the art displays that go on display at Burning Man (though I’ve never been to one myself so no true opinion).

As for 3D printing, I’m personally going to get into bioprinting very very soon. I want to print living cells and stack them into tissues and eventually organs. Though my bioengineer days are past me, I can’t simply abandon the appeal of growing organs from nothing. It’s some sort of Victor Frankensteinian fantasy. Cybernetic organs interlaced with electronic equipment, fully grown kidneys and livers regrown within days, biological self repairing printed living bone structures. It’s all too much. 3D printing is just way too cool.